People born on Halloween are called Tiantai? What do you mean by "rooftop"? I am a girl born in the Mid-Autumn Festival in the Year of the Monkey. Who will give me a detailed answer and offer a reward? Thank you.
Some myths can be explained by science now, but those that can't be explained are because we still need to develop science, but we don't believe in God here!
Let's talk about "Ghost Festival":
The origin of ghost festival
Ghost Festival originated from the story of Manglietia's rescue of mother: "People with Manglietia monks have great strength. His mother fell into the hungry ghost road, and the food mouth turned into flames. Hunger was too bitter. Unable to save her mother, Manglietia asked the Buddha for advice. In order to talk about the Lanpen Sutra, he taught July 15 to be a Lanpen to save his mother. " It is said that at that time, after experiencing all kinds of hardships in the underworld, Manglietia met her dead mother Liu and found that she was tortured by a group of hungry ghosts. Manglietia tried to give her a bowl of vegetable rice, but the vegetable rice was taken away by the hungry ghost. Manglietia had to ask the Buddha for help. The Buddha was moved by Manglietia's filial piety and gave him the Lanjing. According to the instructions, Manglietia dedicated a rare fruit vegetarian meal to her mother on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month. The hungry mother finally got the food. Buddhists hold a grand "bonsai" every year to commemorate the filial piety of Manglietia, which is what we now call "Ghost Festival".
According to the book, on this day in ancient times, people would set up a magician's seat and a stone drum platform in front of Jiekou Village in advance. There is a bodhisattva in front of the master's seat, who is the treasure king who crossed the ghost of "hell". Below is a plate of peaches and rice. Shigu stood on the stage, holding three spiritual cards and evocative complex items in his hand. After noon, families put whole pigs, whole sheep, chickens, ducks and geese and various cakes, fruits and melons on the stone drum stage. The person in charge inserted a triangular paper flag of blue, red and green on each sacrifice, and wrote the words "Yulan Festival" and "Manna Gate Open". The ceremony began with solemn temple music. Then, the mage rang the bell and led the monks in the seat to recite various spells and mantras. Then feed, sprinkle a plate of peaches and rice in all directions and repeat three times. This ceremony is called "the opening of the flame". Wang Kaitai, a scholar in the Qing Dynasty, once wrote a poem: "The Dojo is full of ghosts, and the original ancient meaning of Magnolia still exists. However, it is strange that the red plaque is attached to the door, and the meat mountain wine sea celebrates the Central Plains. " It describes the Halloween customs along the southeast coast of China.
It can be seen that "Ghost Festival" is due to the filial piety of traditional virtues. Nowadays, people in northern China still burn paper money on this day to pay homage to their ancestors who died young and express their thoughts for their loved ones. Although the sacrificial way is simple, it basically retains the simple meaning of Ghost Festival. Because of the call of blood, the extension of feelings and the reminder of one's future, Ghost Festival is endowed with rich humanistic connotation. Even if the years are different and the burned gifts are different, the living will never finish reading endless grief and deep nostalgia for their distant relatives. However, "people of different ages have different feelings about this special festival, because the future festival is coming to them mercilessly, from obscurity to clarity, from missing to fear, from fear to calmness. When they miss the people of the past, they are actually thinking about their experiences, contents, ways and pursuits in today's life."
In Chinese, there are countless words composed of "ghost" such as "ghost hero, ghost, ghost genius", and folk legends about ghosts are even more inexhaustible. China's ghost culture has a long history, reaching an almost perfect level.
Ghost festival culture
It is difficult to see the description of the world after death in ancient mythology, and the word "ghost" didn't mean it at first. In Oracle Bone Inscriptions, the word "ghost" is a word of understanding, and here is the word "person" with a terrible head on it, which means a monster like a person. Later it gradually evolved into something that changed after death. Book of rites? "Sacrifice to Righteousness" has made it very clear: "All beings have to die, and when they die, they return to scholars. This is called a ghost. " Book of rites? The Sacrifice Law further points out: "Ordinary people in Shu Ren have no temples, and when they die, they are ghosts." That is, after the death of dignitaries, there are temples to worship and sacrifices all year round, and they become gods. Ordinary people die, there is no temple to enjoy sacrifices, and wandering around, that is a ghost. The "ghost" explained in China's first dictionary Shuowen means now. There are many words related to ghosts in pre-Qin classics. Confucius famously said "Stay away from ghosts and gods", which shows that Confucianism believes in ghosts and gods, but it is only "respect". Later, although there was Wang Chong's theory of no ghosts in the Eastern Han Dynasty, it could not shake the superstition of Chinese people about ghosts and gods. By the end of Qing Dynasty, although there were fierce ghosts in Pu Songling's works, most of them were young and beautiful female ghosts who attached importance to feelings and righteousness and understood etiquette. After watching Liaozhai, they felt cute, not scary ghosts.
The perfection and enrichment of Chinese ghost culture benefit from Buddhism and Taoism. Taoism is our real estate, and Buddhism was handed down from the west during the Han and Wei Dynasties, and it was integrated with Confucian culture and secular culture. After death, the underworld (also known as the underworld in Buddhism) is gradually established, that is, the world where ghosts live. The main building of Taoism is Fengdu City, which is demonstrated in Pingdu Mountain on the bank of the Yangtze River in eastern Sichuan. The beautiful Pingdu Yamamoto is one of the 72 blessed places of Taoism. Both the king of the Western Han Dynasty and Yin Changsheng of the Eastern Han Dynasty practiced here and later became immortals. Fengdu is haunted by immortals, which is related to the surnames of two immortals. Wang He and Yin read Yin Wang backwards, thus becoming the "king of the underworld". After the deduction of past dynasties and the rendering of The Journey to the West's ghost stories such as Zhong Kui Biography, Fengdu was built into a gloomy ghost town, so there were Naihe Bridge, the Gate of Hell, the boundary of Yin and Yang, the Temple of Emperor, the Temple of Impermanence and the Temple of the City God. Compared with the Taoist underworld, the Buddhist underworld is much more complete and systematic. Buddhism has the so-called "Ten Realms", that is, there are ten realms in the world, namely, Buddha, Bodhisattva, Jue Yuan, Wensheng, Heaven, Man, Asura, beast, evil spirits and hell. The first four are called "four saints", that is, they transcend the sacred world and get rid of the suffering of life and death. The last six kinds are called "six mysteries", which need endless circulation in filthy soil. The last three kinds are also called "three evils" and "three evils", which is a more unfortunate realm, and hell is the most unfortunate. Speaking of hell, it is chilling, with as many as eighteen floors. The further you go, the deeper the pain. In hell, there are not only demons such as Yamaraja, judges and ghosts, but also all kinds of torture such as knives, frying pans, millstones and saws. Therefore, people are most afraid of entering eighteen layers of hell after death.
The history of ghost festival
Grave-sweeping in Tomb-Sweeping Day is related to funeral customs. According to records, in ancient China, "tombs were not graves", that is to say, only graves were dug, and no graves were built, so there was no way to offer sacrifices to sweep them. Later, graves and graves, the custom of offering sacrifices to sweep graves, were supported. During the Qin and Han Dynasties, offering sacrifices to tombs has become an indispensable custom. "Once"? The Book of Ming Di quoted the official etiquette of the Han Dynasty as saying: "In ancient times, there was no tomb sacrifice, and Qin Shihuang slept next to the tomb, so Han remained unchanged. All tombs serve meals with gloom, hope, 24, dog days, society, wax and four o'clock. " The emperor is almost a festival. Ordinary officials and ordinary people don't have so much time and money, so Tomb-Sweeping Day gradually freezes in the 24 solar terms. At that time, the government will allow officials to take time off to offer sacrifices to sweep, and the people will also "go to their parents' graves for fields and roads, full of scholars and women, humble servants and beggars." "In the Tang Dynasty, the sacrificial sweeping has combined cold food with Qingming, and it is spring, so you can go to the grave with wine in your hand. Tomb-Sweeping Day is not only a ghost festival for sacrifice, but also a day for outing and entertainment.
From a secular point of view, the setting of these two ghost festivals is just right. Qingming coincides with the melting of snow and ice in the north. After rain erosion in autumn and winter and snow cover in winter, some loess on the tomb was washed down and became shorter and smaller. Sweep it with Qingming and add some soil to prevent the ancestors' houses from leaking and getting wet. July 15, beginning of autumn has passed, and the weather is getting colder and colder. It's time to add clothes. It's time to send some money to the underground ancestors to buy some clothes so as not to catch cold in winter.
The Chinese nation is a state of etiquette and has always paid attention to paying homage to its ancestors. I remember when my family used to pay homage to their ancestors during the Chinese New Year, the words above were "woody water source" and "Zongshen pursues distant places", which means not to forget the ancestors. During the Cultural Revolution, who dared to burn paper on the grave when capitalism was broken and superstition was opposed? There is no burning paper to buy in the city, but many people still buy white paper to order books for primary school students and secretly burn them to their relatives on the graves. In recent years, with the development of economy, sacrificial supplies have become a major category for businesses to make money. Every Qingming Festival and July 15th, the burning paper in the street is pushed into a hill in front of the store, and the variety and quantity are as many as the fruit boxes piled up during the Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival. Moreover, there are some modern commodities, which are burned into bundles, neat and beautiful, and the marks of ancient coins are evenly printed on them. There are also colorful dollars and Hong Kong dollars, all with large denominations, each of which is hundreds of millions. Coupled with the gold ingots of different sizes in Huang Cancan, if there is a ghost country bank, it will be ashamed of the lack of financial resources and willing to close down. Can burning so much money really make the deceased relatives live a rich life in the underworld? I don't know, there is a saying that "sincerity is the spirit", which means that the heart is there. I remember when I was a child, the old man said that it was not easy to print ready-made burning paper, and no matter how big the face value was, it was useless. It is best to take a chisel that carves wood into copper coins and tap it on the paper with a small hammer. There are many things to pay attention to when typing a paper. It is best to be a descendant of ancestors, and it must be a boy. The hammer must be made of wood, and the marks of hitting cannot be stacked together. When I was a child, I used to do it during the Spring Festival or two Halloween. The old man told me that it would be good to put a seal on it, for fear that he would not know. When he goes to the underworld, he always hits hard. He is also afraid of having less money and not enough ancestors, so he has been playing closely. Although there is more paper now and it looks beautiful, I think the paper money I played when I was a child in later generations can better reflect my true feelings for my ancestors. Of course, on the day of Ghost Festival, from Shan Ye to the street, there are flames everywhere, smoke everywhere, paper scraps flying, causing environmental pollution, and sometimes causing fires and unnecessary losses. What can we do? The custom handed down from ancestors, China people have not learned to use flowers to express their grief and nostalgia for their deceased relatives like westerners. Halloween sacrifice cannot be simply regarded as superstition. In western Christian countries, modern science has sent people to the moon and rockets to Mars, but they still believe in God, which is actually a spiritual sustenance. We burn some paper for our deceased relatives, which seems vulgar, but in fact it contains rich moral and ethical connotations. This is a kind of gratitude and nostalgia for the deceased relatives, a dialogue with people in another world, an exchange with ancestors and a continuation of human race and spirit. Even if relatives are alive, there are cases of unfilial or thoughtless care. When burning paper on the grave, you can get a psychological balance by chanting a few words. Perhaps with the development of the times and the improvement of people's education level, our nation will find a better way to commemorate our ancestors, but in any era, it is indispensable to pay tribute to and remember our ancestors.
Legend has it that July 15 of the lunar calendar is a day when the gates of hell are wide open, and you can spend a day among the dead, including some ghosts who can accept sacrifices from the dead, so that day is also called Ghost Festival.